The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) changed everything
in marketing.

You have to reinvent your entire marketing program.

Not so fast.

Yes, you need to make changes. Your approach to privacy and data
protection needs to change. Despite
these changes, marketing fundamentals remain critical. Let’s focus on one
practice in particular: making offers.

How do you continue to make effective offers in a GDPR world?
The first step lies in understanding the “legitimate interest” principle in
GDPR.

A Quick Refresher On GDPR

Under GDPR, there are six lawful reasons to process personal data. Without one of those lawful reasons, you
should not process data such as email addresses, phone numbers and other
protected information. Processing data generally includes using almost any kind
of marketing automation product or process.

Of the six lawful reasons to process data, legitimate interest
is the most significant for marketers.
When a customer raises their hand to express interest in your company in
a lead generation offer, you can process their data to respond to their
interest.

“Your company/ organization has a legitimate
interest when the processing takes place within a client relationship, when it
processes personal data for direct marketing purposes, to prevent fraud or to
ensure the network and information security of your IT systems.”

How does this work when you have complex marketing campaigns?
Does a prospect signing up for a white paper mean they have demonstrated
“legitimate interest” to be called weekly for the next two years? Traditional
marketing would say yes. Our view of GDPR would say “probably not.”

While we cannot offer legal advice on GDPR compliance, we can
discuss ways to reduce risk while pursuing marketing goals. Instead of the
generalist approach where one signup means you have a blank check to contact
that person, take a different approach. Use multiple lead generation offers and
embedded offers to generate segmented legitimate interest for different
products, services and types of interaction.

The Return of Offers In a Post GDPR World

In the early years of email marketing, you could publish a
landing page, collect emails and market everything to that list.

That`s no longer going to cut it in the post GDPR world. How can
you show that consenting to receive a newsletter automatically means consenting
to receive webinar invitations, calls and more? Instead of facing such
questions, you can avoid them altogether by generating more targeted legitimate
interest..

There are two ways to deploy your offers to increase GDPR
compliance. First, you can make more list building offers on your website. For
example, you may offer content upgrades on popular blog posts. Second, embed
new offers in other offers (e.g. a newsletter includes an offer to register for
a webinar). .

Increase Segmentation By Making More Offers

To illustrate this concept, consider the offers a business
intelligence software could make. The target market is managers of analytics
departments in large companies. The company’s list of marketing offers might
include the following:

Cheat Sheet: How To Package BI Data For
Executive Presentations In 3 Steps (Awareness Level). You could deploy this
offer on the homepage of your website.

Webinar: The 5 Best
Questions To Ask Before You Fund A BI Project. (This offer would be embedded in
the cheat sheet resource)

Content Upgrade: The Top 15 BI Tools, Ranked
[Infographic]

Ebook: How To Assess
Business Intelligence Maturity In 30 Minutes. (This offer would be embedded in
the content upgrade.

Excel Template: Your Buying Due Diligence
Spreadsheet for Business Intelligence

Cheat Sheet. BI Data
Self-Diagnostic In 10 Questions. (The offer to sign up for this offer would be
embedded in the email copy delivering the Excel template).

Each of these offers allows you to generate a different kind of
legitimate interest from your prospects. With each offer, you will be within
your GDPR rights to deliver the asset and follow up about it to a reasonable
degree.

Segmentation Tip: What if the same lead opts in for multiple
offers? That’s good news. If a lead has requested three lead building offers,
they will probably not be offended if you reach out to them directly for a demo
or a call.

Offers Within Offers: Eliminate Your Marketing Dead Ends

Picture this: you publish a new offer and drive traffic to it.
Prospects download the offer, and then engagement falls off. What should you do
next? The traditional playbook would recommend following up constantly until
you get a response. Wait!

Before you send that email blast, remember legitimate interest.
The lead may not have consented to receive general marketing communications.
You run a risk of violating GDPR expectations if you stretch that one
expression of legitimate interest to the breaking point. At the same time, you
don’t want to have marketing dead ends where those leads never engage with you
again.

What’s the solution? You need to rebuild your offers so that one
offer always has one other offer embedded in it.

Embedding offers inside other offers and content helps you to
stay GDPR compliant. For example, if we made an offer to sign up for one of our
webinars in an ebook, that would be an embedded offer. At the end of that
webinar, there might be another offer to sign up for a GDPR checklist. In each
step, you are demonstrating interest. You still need to remain mindful about
making too many offers and make sure that you deliver on what you promise.

When To Use Which Kind of Offer?

To continue with the business intelligence example from above,
here are some further offer ideas to consider.

Content Offer. Offer additional content that
moves the prospect closer to buying. For example, offer a resource that shows
them how to create a business case for business intelligence.

Demo Invitation. Invite the prospect to see
the product in action. Best suited for highly engaged leads.

Strategy Session Call. This offer may be
better suited if you are promoting training or professional services.

General Marketing Offer. This is “Plan B” and
will generally be more difficult. You are asking a prospect to raise their hand
for any marketing you have to share. A long disclaimer message on the opt-in
page would be one way to execute this approach.

Tip: Apply what you’ve read about embedding offers. How could
pick two of the offers from the list above and brainstorm a few ways you could
connect them together?

Of Course, We’ll Conclude With An Offer For You
Naturally, we are going to end this post with an offer for you. As an
Eloqua user, you probably have dozens or more offers in place already and many
list segments. Are those offers structured to work in a post GDPR marketing
world? Find out by requesting a GDPR marketing assessment now.